Academic writing features

The mastery of academic writing conventions is indispensable in order to participate in the discourse community of professional teachers. According to Pintos (2008), “by analyzing vocabulary, grammar, construction of sentences, and paragraphs (. . .) we will be able to enter and participate in an academic discourse community of teachers and researchers” (p.6). In this paper, some aspects of academic writing present in the article by Myles (2002) dealing with research on the writing process and error analysis in student texts will be analyzed.
In almost all paragraphs, ideas are supported with in text citations. Most of the citations start with the source beginning with the phrase “According to” followed by the main idea. In the majority of citations there is use of inverted commas. There are a few cases of citations without inverted commas, which means that the citation has been paraphrased from the original version.
As regards the reporting verbs used in the citations the most frequent are: argue, state, claim observe, criticize and assume. Regarding introductory phrases, the utterance “according to” is widely used for the citations, whereas for other purposes such as expressing addition, contrast, enumeration or exemplification , a huge number of discourse markers are used . Some of them are: In short, as previously mentioned, as a result, on the other hand, additionally, consequently, needless to say.
There are only two cases of insertion in the article by Myles (2002). Both of them are capitalizations at the beginning of a new paragraph. The first case is the capitalization of the “l” (para.7) and the second insertion is the capitalization of “a” (para.2). Omissions, either of whole paragraphs or parts of them, are not evidenced in the text.
All things considered, it can be affirmed that the analysis of the constituent aspects of academic writing provides the foundations for productive pieces, so that the writers belong to the discourse community of professional teachers and researchers.

References
Miles, J. (2002). Second Language Writing and Research: The Writing Process and Error Analysis in Student Texts. TESEL-EJ, 6, 2, 2002. Queen'sUniversity. Retrieved from UNIVERSIDAD CAECE, Buenos Aires, ARG.

Pintos, V. (2008). Unit 3. Academic Writing. Lengua Especializada I. UNIVERSIDAD CAECE, Bs As, ARG. Retrieved August 30, 2009, from http://caece.campusuniversidad.com.ar/ mod/resource/view.php?id=2725